In 2001, Abdullah Al Noaimi was a 19-year-old Bahraini traveling in Pakistan. Bounties were being offered for men who fit his description, which is why he ended up detained in a Pakistani jail. When he learned he’d be turned over to Americans, he told “This American Life” journalist Jack Hitt that he was relieved. “He told the other prisoners it was good news. He knew America. He knew how the people were,” Hitt explained.

Abdullah, it turns out, had gone to Old Dominion University in Virginia. He’d been to Disneyland. To him, Americans had a reputation of being fair, friendly and level-headed.

“I was pleased,” said Abdullah. “Oh, everything’s going to be fine. They [Americans] can understand.”

He was then shackled and shipped to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It’s been well-documented the methods used on prisoners in our strategically off-shore supermax gulag: beatings, burnings, urinating on prisoners, sleep deprivation, force-feeding, electric shocks, the threat of rape and other demeaning humiliations.

The articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention were drafted in 1949 in the wake of the atrocities from Nazi Germany and Japan during WWII. They covered the humane treatment of prisoners of war—specifically, they prohibited torture, degrading treatment and unsanitary conditions. The Fourth Geneva Convention was a resolve by 194 countries to be better than the Japanese and nothing like the Nazis.

Fifty years later, George W. Bush decided these men we’d bribed the locals to turn in were not POWs, but rather enemy combatants. Therefore, they reasoned, the Geneva Convention, once the great aspiration of the world after the “the most devastating war in history” didn’t apply. And habeas corpus, a 400-year-old staple of Western civilization, was no longer relevant.

Decency, fairness and justice were all thrown out in the name of national security. Gone.

Instead of being leaders on human rights like Abdullah Al Noaimi assumed we were—we opened Guantanamo Bay.

And to make this $150 million a yearblack spot worse, 70 percent of the prisoners being held indefinitely at Gitmo are in isolation.

Is solitary confinement torture? Yes, according to the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights, the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, and other groups who signed a petition with the United Nations stating exactly that.

We rationalize this by saying it’s not happening to Americans. “The guys in Guantanamo, they’re terrorists. Americans don’t get treated like that.”

Wrong.

The United States leads the world in prisoners with 2.2 million incarcerated Americans (that’s four Wyomings, census nerds). Of those, 81,622 are in solitary confinement according to the most recent data the federal government released.

California prisons alone house 11,730 of them.

In July 2013, the largest hunger strike in California prison history took place. During that strike, 30,000 men and women went without meals so their living conditions might be improved. Adequate food and an end to indefinite and long-term solitary confinement is what they were demanding. Basically, what we as a country agreed to following WWII—what the Bill of Rights ensures for U.S. citizens.

And why should we care if a bunch of murderous thugs in Bakersfield suffer?

For the same reason we allow civilians to stockpile weapons and say the most depraved and disgusting things imaginable—it’s in the Bill of Rights. The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment and that includes torture.

If the Constitution is good enough justification to protect nutty Uncle Ernie’s arsenal and Glenn Beck subscription, then it should suffice for halting long-term solitary confinement of both enemy combatants and U.S. citizens.

The problem is we’ve accepted cruel and unusual punishment as, well, usual. Tell us it’ll make us safer, we’ll agree to just about anything. (Case in point: The TSA ogled the genitals of airline passengers for years until someone realized the Advanced Imaging Technology scanners would work just as well showing only a generic outline of a person.)

According to the numbers, solitary confinement doesn’t make us safer. It just makes us crueler.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed here are those of the individual contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the LA Progressive, its publisher, editor or any of its other contributors.

LGBT Rights

Irene Monroe: Long before June officially became Gay Pride Month, and October “Coming Out Month” for the LGBTQ community, Halloween was unofficially our yearly celebrated “holiday,” dating as far back at the 1970s when it was a massive annual street party in San Francisco’s Castro district.

The Middle East

Richard Greeman: Anti-government demonstrations spread across Morocco after social media spread the story of Mousine Fikri, a fishmonger crushed to death inside a garbage truck as he tried to block the destruction of a truckload of his fish confiscated by police.